Strategic Change

Strategic Change:

Planning a game changer?
We’re all in.

Real progress often requires changing whole systems. And let’s face it, those are some complex and interconnected structures you’re about to topple and rebuild. Daunted? No need. When your organization and people are prepared, aligned, and ready, this change can be smooth, empowering and even fun. We manage transitions so this can be a journey of experiences that engage your people, mitigate performance dips, and sustain your success over time.

Strategic Change transitions your environment and people to higher-performing systems

Here’s how.

Organizational change can take many shapes, such as restructuring, product consolidation or centralizing a business service like HR or IT. Supporting that type of change effort—leading the organization to their desired future—takes both macro (organization or departmental) and micro (personal) changes. In truth, your one big change is actually a series of multiple, significant, personal and individual changes.

The task ahead of you includes inspiring your people to a new way of doing things while mitigating their personal stress. And that requires significant, intentional design. Meanwhile, the responsibility of your main job—operating the business—must continue.

While you are focusing on the business strategy and the countless decisions that need to be made about organization design, we can help you create and sustain a productive, high-performing work environment for your people. We support the individual attention, leadership alignment, coaching, communication, reinforcement, and support needed to create the engagement of those individuals who can make the strategy reality.

According to the Harvard Business Review, the failure rate of mergers and acquisitions is somewhere between 70 and 90 percent. These deals looked great on paper, so… what happened? Something wasn’t accounted for, and usually it was people. Mergers and acquisitions bring multiple, significant, personal changes for individuals. To navigate it all, they need aligned leaders who are providing communication, individual attention, training, coaching, reinforcement, and support. We design acquisition transition strategies that help organizations succeed at all of this, empowering people to embrace their new reality.

For employees, mergers trigger a stress response—and people are hardwired to react to stress with resistance. To reduce their natural “fight or flight” impulse, we help you mitigate your people’s worry from the outset. But that’s not all. Because beneath the surface of worry and stress, most acquired employees face an unexpected sense of loss. Many had personally identified with their organization, its culture, and its leadership, and feel a bit of grief as they move forward. We guide organizations through this natural mourning, so your people can put it in context in a healthy way and then pivot to embrace their new, day-to-day reality.

We find that addressing people’s concerns head-on, and early, allows you to then broaden their focus to your vision, purpose, business priorities, systems, work processes, and culture. By sharing the big picture—while at the same time addressing their individual experience—you’ll help frame their perspective. That’s how you’ll get your workforce onboarded, engaged, and inspired so they want to go where the organization is headed.

When it comes to systems change and implementation, we completely get it—whether it’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools or HRIS, systems to manage policies and procedures, programs to handle rewards and recognition, or the integration of multiple platforms. You’ve got to upgrade, because the most efficient way to operate is with complimentary and integrated systems that optimize and support your employees’ performance.

We understand this huge opportunity—and the huge hurdle—because we regularly (and successfully!) help companies evaluate what’s working well, what could improve, and how to make a meaningful and sustainable change.

We help organizations take long, difficult, and technical implementations and shape them into engaging, motivating, fun turning points that your people are personally invested in. That leads to enterprise-wide, lasting results.

Keep exploring

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Talent Development

Ready to advance the impact of your people? We’ll help you build a high-performing workforce with the mindsets, behaviors and capabilities required to meet your organization’s strategic and operational goals.